By Hope Madden 
We Bury the Dead
After a catastrophic military disaster, the dead don’t just rise, they hunt. Ava searches for her missing husband, but what she finds is far more terrifying.
Release date2 January 2026 (USA)
DirectorZak Hilditch
Starring Daisy Ridley; Mark Coles Smith; Brenton Thwaites
Ever wonder what Daisy Ridley does after Star Wars? She’s not chasing lightsabers. She’s in Tasmania, for one thing. Burying bodies. Or, well, trying to.
We Bury the Dead. That’s the film. A zombie movie with a name that sounds more like a vow, or a weary chore. Director Zak Hilditch pulls you into a chemically-blasted landscape where the horror isn’t just the “dead coming back online.” It’s the silence after the blast. The paperwork of cataloguing corpses. The stubborn, maybe foolish, love that makes a person like Ava, Ridley’s character, volunteer for that grim duty just to sneak closer to the epicentre. To find her husband.
This is contemplative action, if such a thing exists. A slow burn through toxic smoke. Sure, there are rogue shooters, military blockades, and all that. But Hilditch seems more interested in the dust settling in the odd couple dynamic between Ridley’s driven Ava and Brenton Thwaites’s disrespectful, chain-smoking partner. It’s a performance thing, really. Ridley has this magnetic inward focus—she carried a franchise, you know, and now she chooses these quietly complicated indie roles. It works here. Even when the plot itself, frankly, writes a check it can’t quite cash later on.
Look, it won’t reinvent the wheel. But for a zombie film? It finds a strange, lonely beauty in the apocalypse. Tasmania’s stark vistas become a character. And the genre gets a few new ideas before it, inevitably, stumbles back on a tired old cliché or two. Typical. But for a while there, it feels different. It feels like they might actually bury the dead, instead of just shooting them again.
Daisy Ridley’s Undead Drama: A Review of We Bury the Dead’s Quiet Zombie Apocalypse
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
We Bury the Dead is an intriguing title, particularly for a zombie movie. Writer/director Zak Hilditch’s latest mixes familiar with fresh, focused less on scares than on contemplative action.
Daisy Ridley is Ava, a young woman determined to find her husband (Matt Whelan) after a US chemical weapons mishap wipes out every living thing in Tasmania. She volunteers with a group who will find, catalog, and bury the dead. As a Yank, she’s not too welcome, but her ulterior motive is to get to the heart of the catastrophe, to the resort where her husband had gone for a conference. To find him, she’ll have to risk exposure to the smoke, the military, rogue sharp shooters, and the dead who come “back online”.
Ridley has made a series of fascinating choices since being catapulted into merciless Star Wars fandom with her career-making turns as Rey. She has gravitated mainly toward quietly complicated characters in mid-budget independent films, as well as voice work in animation and documentary.
While not every project has been a winner, Ridley’s flexed a range of muscles. From dark, dry, awkward comedy (Sometimes I Think About Dying) to meditative, spooky thriller (The Marsh King’s Daughter) to inspirational, true life-adventure (Young Woman and the Sea), Ridley brings an introspective magnetism to projects. The same can be said for her work in Hilditch’s Tasmanian zombie drama.
Ava develops a frenemy situation with her volunteer partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a bad boy who smokes a lot, shows no respect for the dead, and just might be criminal enough to help Ava get through the restricted areas of the country. Thwaites’s performance is better than the script, but it’s still tough to buy the burgeoning friendship.
A late side story with Riley (Mark Coles Smith) edges the film closer to horror, but Hilditch’s interests lie in drama. The heart of the story has to be the reason Ava risks so much to find Mitch. Much credit goes to Hilditch for some of the surprises he has in store, but he writes himself into a corner he can’t quite escape.
And though he crafts a few truly memorable sequences and injects zombie lore with a few new ideas, he unfortunately leans back on one of the most tiresome and suddenly popular cliches, a choice meant to wrap Ava’s arc up in a tidy bow when dystopia calls for messes.
But Ridley and Thwaites carve a compelling odd couple and Tasmania offers a handful of fascinating new details for the genre.
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Jim Mcleod